Curled up on the upstairs couch this morning, enjoying my little Christmas tree with the snow gently falling outside the window, once again leafing through Lisa MacIntosh’s book Music Makers: Stories of The Great Hall. I’m discovering pictures of people I have also photographed during my treks through the Toronto club and concert scene. Faces I recognize but didn’t necessarily know their names or even who they were. (I keep hearing the voice of my friend Sam Taylor in the back of my head….”you know him, you shot him at the Kelly Jay benefit….ya, you know her/him too from (insert show/club/etc. here)…”

It’s Tuesday night, November 17. My renovations are nearing completion, the house is dead quiet as I sit here, stretched out on the couch, looking around at this home we lived in together for 18 years. Remembering all the wonderful celebrations, dinners, Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners, TV watching, companionable “book reading”, and just quietly being, soaking up each other’s presence.

You would have had to be living under a rock to miss the run up to Diane Sawyer’s two hour interview with Bruce Jenner on Friday, April 23. Jenner was dubbed the “world’s greatest athlete” after winning the Olympic Gold Decathlon in 1976, and has been the object of snide insinuations and ridiculing photos in the yellower media (and even the New York Times) for the last several months as he appeared to be transitioning from male to female before our prying eyes.

I am a lost Son of Canada. I must be. I love Canadian bacon, though bacon it not really be (except maybe technically). I love Jennifer Dale, an actor who deserved much more than she has been afforded, respect-wise (I reveled in her work on Canadian TV and film during Comcast’s all-too-short span of including CTV and CBC on their cable lineups in the ’80s). I love Due South, one of the most creative and funny-on-so-many-levels series TV has ever created (the transition of Ray to Ray— David Marciano to Callum Keith Rennie— a work of pure writing craftmanship).